Conveying Ideas with Animations

Animated videos have been quite popular on the internet ever since YouTube became big.

The reasons for the popularity of animated short explanation videos could be many: Whether it is because people have a limited attention span, or don’t want to read through hundreds of words of text, or this new medium allows more expressiveness.

Personally, I have very high hopes for creating understandable and easily consumable explanations and to explore this (for amateurs) relatively new medium of animations with voice over. I see a great future for decently produced animations, and they are just so much easier to share in the social web than unwieldy, long text.

So I’ve set myself the megalomanic goal of producing animated videos to express some psychological, philosophical, spiritual concepts. Much like xkcd, the first attempts have a good chance to be crap, but over time I should be getting better at this.

Of course, I am not getting started on this immediately – NOO! In my usual procrastination mode, I first have to develop a set of dozens of pictograms to visualize some of the most abstract concepts out there. And where better to start drawing pictograms than buying 10 books on pictograms on Amazon? Yes, I admit it, I am a fanatic, I am obsessive.

In order to document my progress, here are some Public Domain pictograms I have collected on the internet, based on which I am now planning to develop my own ones. Who would have thought that this could be so damn hard ;) I would have loved to find many, many more public domain pictograms, but many on the web are licensed under Creative Commons (which I find difficult to attribute for pictograms), and also of unclear authorship.

The next step is now to develop my own pictograms for concepts such as enlightenment, consciousness & happiness, to choose the right tools for creating animations (Keynote, Powerpoint, Apple Motion, prezi, etc.) and to actually get going.

thanks for your encouraging feedback.
Funnily enough it is not too hard for most concepts to express them as pictograms (with a couple of exceptions). I am currently learning some Inkscape to sketch my pictograms, but once again my lack of drawing and sketching exercise slows me down. But I should be making quite some progress in the next weeks.

Unfortunately, I can’t get Mac OS X installed on my MacBook – I guess it hasn’t fully recovered from my BootCamp triple boot setup. Therefore, I still wasn’t able to test whether Keynote is the right tool, or whether I might go with the fantastic infinite-canvas prezi.

Thanks for the link to iconfinder.com. I hadn’t even considered to look for GPL’ed content, because I was so annoyed by the attribution clause of Creative Commons licenses. Not sure how people are supposed to attribute dozens of pictograms used on signs or even in an animation.